Jockie Loomer-Kruger

Jockie Loomer-Kruger moved back to Nova Scotia following retirement years spent in Saskatchewan and Ontario. Her return to the town she left forty years earlier came just in time to be locked down in her Truro condo.

Throughout the COVID-19 isolation of 2020 she applied herself to polishing the manuscript of her first novel, and sometimes ducking into her art room to create whimsical folk art paintings.

Jockie describes her working life as a potpourri. She has been a nursery school teacher, receptionist, bookkeeper, florist, and antiques shop owner. Her playtime life has included writing for amateur theatre, The Globe and Mail, Homemakers, Humanist Perspectives, Folklore, and 50 Plus Magazine; and, in 2021, a Moose House novel, Until the Day We Die.

She self-published her first book, Valley Child—A Memoir (2016), the year she turned 80, with support from the Region of Waterloo Arts fund. In the summer of 2020 she donated the book rights and her 33 original folk-art illustrations to the West Hants Historical Society Museum in Windsor, Nova Scotia.

She has two daughters in Nova Scotia, a son in Ontario, and a longing for a cat, but has settled for chickadees at her bird feeder.

  • Falmouth's Painted Stairs

    Falmouth Painted Stairs

     $15.00 Add to cart

    Painted Stairs – Jockie Loomer-Kruger

    Now into my 89th year, I feel an urgency to complete the story of the backstair risers I painted in 1992, in the Falmouth house my husband, Herb Kruger, and I, owned for ten years-from 1985-1995.

    Growing up, I’d known this century home as the F.H. (Frederick Hamilton) Manning house. My father told me it had been built prior to the devastating Windsor fire of 1897. And he also told me that the story was that Mr. Manning had insisted it be sturdily constructed with what my father called ‘double framing.’ I remember huge timbers in the basement and very even floors throughout the house.

  • Valley Child: A Memoir

     $30.00 Add to cart

    This book recounts 32 individual stories of Jockie Loomer-Kruger’s growing up years at the head of Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley, in the apple-growing community of Falmouth.

    Told with candor, sensitivity, and humor, the stories are sad, poignant, and laugh-out-loud funny. Each story is illustrated by the author in a folk-art style that colorfully evokes a feeling of childhood.

    The creation of this book was made possible with a grant from the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund.

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